While most of you are preparing to celebrate the upcoming year of the Dragon BLUG would like to take this opportunity to wish you good fortune and happiness for the new year. We hope to have you back on time for the upcoming February meeting (Tuesday February 14th) and if you're still in town during the festivities we might even plan for one of our famous chuan'r night! Nothing is set yet, but feel free to jump into the forum and let us know you'll be around and participating.

Just a few more days to wait until this week-end's birthday party and 52 people have already registered! This is the second best total after the 81 registrations from the 6th birthday. Still, registrations are still open so hurry up and sign up!. And do not forget to check the hackerhunt prerequisites and to practice your favorite Frets on Fire songs ;-)

The first batch of pictures from the Software Freedom Day event at the Hot Cat Club has been uploaded, thanks Peter! We've had a great time and are very please to have met a few new faces. Many thanks to all the presenters and members who have helped organizing. The picture gallery can be accessed here, please contact us on the forum if you have more pictures!

Noticed the picture of this article changed? That's because we have updated some more pictures on the website, many thanks to Susy and Li Yang for these!

Here we are people, the BLUG is coming kicking and screaming in the XXIst century: we now have a weibo group aka a 微群 or a twitter group thingy. Many thanks to Susy for taking care of setting it up. We of course warmly encourage all the BLUG members to join it at http://q.weibo.com/657719. We hope that it will bring some more visibility to the BLUG and help recruit more members. The plan is use it as a promotion channel in Chinese for our events and the group in general please also help us doing this!

As we had some technical difficulties last month with the website we had to move our VPS (kindly sponsored by Candis) from Beijing to Hong Kong: the problem lied first with an expired ICP number and then some local routing issues in the new data center. So now that everything is back to normal and that our monthly meeting is passed we will apply for a new ICP number which will require to take the site offline for 20 days (well the domain name really). During this time the BLUG website will be available on a different URL:http://blug.chinalug.org. Hopefully all the services and links will be working, but there will also probably be some hard coded links here and there. So please do write down the temporary URL as we won't be able to make any redirection and won't have any other way to let you know. Of course our IRC channel is probably your next best bet should you forget the new temporary URL.